To help you save a lot of time and get the best possible photographs, this video walks you through the various camera settings and menus you can adjust to get certain results. The expert instructor shows you actual settings on his camera and demonstrates these by taking some test photographs. Although each camera’s menu names and settings are slightly different, you can easily apply what you learn in this video no matter what camera you have. Armed with the information you learn here, you’ll know how to alter issues like lighting and contrast, thus making post-processing significantly more streamlined.
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On my MacBook Pro, I get no response for this video. Can’t watch it. Disappointing.
Hi.
Was a little confused about your statement on colour temp. I was always told that something at a higher colour temperature was colder not warmer. So something around 5000k was warmer the something at 6500k. So I was wondering, why is a tungsten lamp at around 2500k look yellow if the camera is set at 5500k ?
What is the ball head on the tripod from video – Photo with camera corrections?
Please explain why you stated the higher the Kelvin number the warmer the light. This is opposite to fact.
Hi Jeff,
Ha!
Good catch and it would seem to make sense for someone who knows how White Balance works which you obviously do, but actually the lesson
is not wrong and you are both right!
What a typical approach to color balance setting with Kelvin is to take a color temp reading with a color temp meter and simply set the camera to that degree warmth or cool and the camera adjusts the file accordingly. In this sense you are absolutely correct the higher the number the bluer the light. Classically a tungsten source, a household bulb with a filament is around 3200 degrees Kelvin and a sunny day has a cooler, bluer, color temp at around 5200, cloudy light, even cooler, is around 6000K
So when you set your camera for a shady scene at a very high Kelvin setting ie: 6700 you are telling the camera this scene very cool/blue
and it needs to really “warm” the file up to make it right. So in the case of the scene in the lesson the camera over did it, and adds extra warmth to the file which in this case is what you want. By using the Kelvin setting you control the exact amount of warmth/cool in camera.
So to simplify: That scene maybe needed 5700 K to be be normal and telling the camera 6700 K and additional 1000K of warmth was added.
What the presenter was saying was not that the higher the color temperature the warmer light is, (your point, and you are right it’s the opposite)what he was getting at is the higher the color temperature you set the in the camera Kelvin white balance the warmer your file will be.
Pro tip: AWB, auto white balance, typically does a good job of color correction but often has trouble with florescent lighting and with straight tungsten lighting. With florescent lights it’s might be that there is a warm green tint and with the tungsten (like stage lighting) it is really warm, in these cases switching to the dedicated white balance pre-sets may help. If not, and you are shooting RAW, try to get a white or neutral gray sample in one of the shots and you will be able to easily batch correct all the shots in Lightroom or Photoshop.
Happy Shooting!
-Steve
Looking forward to this.
A great educational, thank you.
I notice that when Active D-Lighting is High then you have more blinks flashing. To lower the contrast is the camera simply increasing the exposure by a fraction of a stop?
Hi, Tom. Nikon is not about to release the secret sauce on how the Active D-Lighting works, but my guess is that like similar options for highlight control from Canon and the great out of the box images from our phones theses days the effect is a result of “computational” photography. This is where digital photography is heading and broadly speaking it is the in-camera, instantaneous, post production done by the mini-computer that is your camera. When you think about it, it makes sense…the sensor is getting the raw data and then is gets processed by the internal circuits in the body. Typically these parameters are set to produce a realistic rendition of the scene. With computational photography the camera circuits goes one step further and bakes in preferences for more or less contrast, saturation, noise, sharpness etc. Using these enhancement options are a great time saver if you are not wanting to spend time adjusting images after the shoot. Personally I play prefer to make those decisions myself. Except for highlight controls I turn off any enhancement options. I prefer a solid RAW file and to make contrast and color choices for myself when I sitting in front of a good monitor evaluating the image. That said no judging here, whatever works best for your workflow is the way to go, as always try all the options and see what you like best. It’s all about options, we are lucky to have great technologies to pick and choose from! Happy Shooting!